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Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?

340 points jbornhorst | 1 comments | 07 Mar 25 17:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I’m digging into an idea around eyeglasses, screen-time, and vision discomfort. If you wear prescription glasses but still get headaches, eye strain, or blurry vision after long screen days, I’d love to chat briefly (20–30 min).

Pure research, zero selling.

Interested? Drop a comment below or email me directly at jbornhorst [at] gmail.com. I’ll coordinate a convenient time to talk.

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genewitch ◴[07 Mar 25 21:00 UTC] No.43294587[source]▶
The longer i stay up the blurrier my vision gets, and no pair of glasses completely corrects my vision. i was 25/20 or better in each eye until a couple of years ago, i scratched my left lens somehow and i got wicked poked in the eye by my kid in the right eye, into the socket. I can drive without glasses, but i can't read the sideroad signs on the 8' poles very well.

I originally got my prescription with an Eye-Q device, and had a professional "correct" it.

I cannot read pill bottles and the like without a magnifying glass, and haven't been able to for a little over 2 years, right before the poking and scratching - which is why i originally thought i needed glasses.

my biggest issue with the way prescriptions are decided is the "this one, or this one" and they both look equally crappy, and they say "which looks less crappy" and i just pick randomly, because they're both awful. and then it continues, where it's just blurry from there on out. I don't understand the mechanism to give me glasses that will correct my vision when the device they use to test makes everything look blurry! At least i understand how the Eye-Q device works...

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dmoy ◴[07 Mar 25 21:35 UTC] No.43295002[source]▶
> my biggest issue with the way prescriptions are decided is the "this one, or this one" and they both look equally crappy, and they say "which looks less crappy" and i just pick randomly, because they're both awful. and then it continues, where it's just blurry from there on out.

I had an eye opening (ha) experience once I got pretty deep into 200/300/600 yard high power rifle. I was trying to debug an issue with my 600 yard shots clustering in three places - one cluster right in the middle, another cluster directly left, and a third cluster somewhere else

You set up these camera thingies (https://scattusa.com/) and it shows you an exact trace of what's going on with your aiming, while not using any ammo (recoil hides a lot so you do most practice without ammo).

The left cluster ended up being super obvious: trigger control and problems relaxing, making me physically jump shots over there - you could see lines from the Scatt go right after shot breaks.

The other cluster though was strange as hell. It was just not in the right spot. But it was a singular spot, I had two remaining clusters. There was no movement between middle and other cluster like there was with the left. It just looked like some percentage of the time I aimed at the wrong spot (not that far off, but enough to drop points).

Then one day when lying on the ground for an hour with the Scatt, I started seeing double. I'd blink and it would go away, but by relaxing a lot I could make it go back. The double vision was right where the cluster was.

Then I looked up more info on astigmatism (had >2 diopter astigmatism?), and it turns out it's literally just light refracting into 2+ places instead of 1. And of course the real bullseye people know about this (since in high power honestly we're kinda pretending at it), and they have specialized sights for correcting the axis and magnitude of astigmatism:

https://gehmann.com/en/579-Cylindrical-lens-system-0-2-Spher...

And sure enough, that's like the same thing the optometrist is doing. Except in the context of bullseye you can physically see the 2 bullseyes floating around an axis and then coming together.

I get why they do it the way they do it, because your brain corrects the astigmatism and doesn't let you see double normally, but if you can train your eye/brain to kinda dissociate and see double, you can get a pretty exact correction for astigmatism.

Then I got LASIK and my 600 yard scores went from high 170s/ low 180s to like 195+. Lol.

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1. genewitch ◴[07 Mar 25 22:09 UTC] No.43295321[source]▶
the damage to both my eyes was such that my left eye i had a giant ryuken swish around any point source of light (leds on devices, car headlamps, etc). The right eye was like 3 dim blurry copies around a point light source.

Eventually, i was able to count 8 distinct "copies" in my left eye. It made trying to determine what was in front of me at night nearly impossible, and i stopped driving until after the medication they gave me worked.

The Eye-Q device has a red and a green "bar" and those rotate with each "test", you push buttons on the device until you see a yellow bar appear distinct from the red and green bars, then you hit "ok", it rotates, spreads the bars apart, and you start again.

What's interesting is i never failed to get that yellow bar with the eye-q - i'd have expected that to be synonymous with getting a clear image from the optometrist tool - which copilot tells me is called a phoropter. To be silly, i will pronounce that "fuh-rope-ter" and see if anyone notices.

edit; i just checked, right eye i can see 4 lights on my NAS blinking, left eye i see at least 8 without glasses, only 4 with. These aren't very bright, so i'll have to remember to test outside at night with a planet or a distant street light. a single copy of a light source isn't as bad as 4 or 8 or a giant swish!

2: I know the doubling you're talking about when looking through sights. There's something about the way parallax works that i don't think it's "tricked" me in the past. I wonder now if i could group, at all?!